11 Apr 2019

The Young and Evil

David Zwirner

Reviewed by William Corwin

Like archeologist Howard Carter, Jarrett Earnest unearths a King Tut’s tomb of art treasures from a subject that has been known for ages. "The Young and Evil" maps the creativity and connections of a tight group of artists centering on Pavel Tchelitchew, Paul Cadmus, Fidelma Cadmus Kirstein, Jared French, and George Tooker. They reached back to both archaic media (egg tempera, silverpoint) and styles (pre-classical Greek sculpture, medieval panel painting) and broadcast intimate aspects of their lives figurally, when most of the art world hid behind an interpretation of Freudian analysis via abstraction.

These artists have the courage to enunciate their subjects: sexuality and queerness, as in the lyrical erotic diagrams for Alfred Kinsey by Cadmus. But the centerpiece of the show is Tchelitchew. A sequential portrait George Platt Lynes (ca. 1937-42) evokes medieval sacred portrait and biographical strategies, showing Lynes as a photographer at work. His Portrait of Fidelma (1947) imagines a fellow painter as a series of throbbing neural circuits.